A few short years ago, it would have been unthinkable for the leader of a major political party to admit to having a child born outside of wedlock, or be seen – gasp! – to be cohabiting. It reflects a welcome shift in society that Ed Miliband could be elected to the leadership without this being an issue, but it also highlights that unwelcome and continuing trend of personality politics.

It has always been imperative that party leaders, if they are to be electable, are at the very least seen to inhabit the mainstream. This used to mean Married with Children, as if it were indicative of great character, particularly if you were going to keep Middle England on side.

But now, with the number of new marriages at its lowest level in more than 100 years, does this really mean so much any more? And, more than that, does it not mean that Miliband may actually be a leader in tune with the "new generation" or at least reflective of someone who may live in the modern world?

Although the new Labour leader's marital status is almost certainly not the result of canny positioning (more likely his ascent has been so swift that he was caught by surprise – he does rather have that rabbit-in-headlights look about him), for my money he reflects his generation's values about marriage rather well.

When he says, "We'll get round to it at some point, but I don't think people would mind if we didn't," he's right. There is a romantic ideal there, but it's not the be-all and end-all.

The Daily Mail has been attacking him for most of the week about his personal life, or, as they put it, his "less than conventional approach to traditional family values".

But rather than simply attack him on the marriage angle, which once would have been enough, they have shoe-horned it into a general assault on him as a sort of dangerous middle-class subversive. Ed Miliband and Justine Thornton's partnership is portrayed as the result of his being the son of a "north London Marxist intellectual" with a "bohemian" background. They live in Primrose Hill, the paper splutters, an area popular with "actors, musicians and affluent leftwingers … "

Yes, he has been kicking about in Labour circles for yonks, yes, his background and family circumstances are rather colourful, but his lack of urgent concern for marriage may actually be the one thing that shows him to be part of his much-vaunted "new generation".

Daily Mail aside, perhaps it signals a dying hypocrisy in the clearly unmanaged way he has handled this, and how the world just turned around and shrugged its shoulders.

It's perhaps worth recalling that just a few decades ago there was another party leader – a prime minister, in fact – who clearly didn't fit into the traditional mould: dear old Ted Heath. Perhaps if he had been a part of this "new generation" he wouldn't have been forced to lie about his personal life in order to get on.

However, Miliband's not quite throwing the illegitimate (what a thoroughly unpleasant and judgment-filled word that is) baby out with the bath water. To TV interviewer Kate Garraway, he said: "Stable families come in different forms. We happen not to be married." But then, almost as if to offer reassurance that this new generation still has respect for those institutions, he pulled back a little, adding: "We will get married eventually."

Whatever happens, as long as this is their personal choice and not because he is bullied into it, best of luck to them both.